“When I arrive at [Canon], I feel certain I have stepped back in time to a 1960s film… I am greeted at the desk by young women in bright pink skirt suits… (think Renee Zellweger in Down with Love)… Forget about pouring tea, when you come to work dressed like Minnie Mouse, there’s no question as to whether or not you’re on the career track.” Kickboxing Geishas pg 69

“The Japanese woman shopping abroad is as universal an urban scene as the street corner vendor or the subway busker… But it wasn’t until I began to interview Japanese women that I realized they are shopping for more than retail goods…they are picking up samples of independance, which they pack away and bring back home.” Kickboxing Geishas pg 90

“In Japan, the men cannot rape the women because they do not have the energy” A Japanese Diet member in the 1980s, according to Kickboxing Geishas pg 110

“The pictures showed things that were particularly unpleasant for women, such as chest hair. It was decided that showing them things they didn’t want to see was sexual harassment.” A JR statement on deciding to take down a poster advertising a festival in Iwate

“There was a period in the heady, decadent days of the Edo Period when there was women’s sumo as well. At first they appeared in just loincloths like the men, but eventually the law made them cover up; the engravers of popular woodblock ukiyo-e prints had to oblige by adding vests to cover breasts” Well, the men show their tits off so why shouldn’t the women?? Insight Guides Japan

“…Japanese women have developed the production of guilt in others into a transcendent cultural art form” from ““The Japanese Educational Challenge” by Merry White (1987)

“The entire population got into the act to make those airplanes or munitions of war… men,women and children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done.”

Curtis LeMay, mastermind of the firebombing of Japanese cities, quoted in Japan Times, 17 Feb 08

“Men are supposed to be responsible for protecting newborn babies, women and aged mothers. Men in Japan, however, are utterly incapable of accomplishing this mission because they do not receive military training”

Then Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro, Japan Times International, April 1999

“After a mother turns 35, her amniotic fluid becomes spoiled. True, true! It gets dirty. That’s why I want her to have a baby before she turns 35”

Singer Koda Kumi, according to the Japan Times, 17 Feb 08

“…Japanese women have developed the production of guilt in others into a transcendent cultural art form” Merry White

“Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a ”women’s culture” with its own customs, values and even language” Kittredge Cherry in “Womansword” (1987)

“To attract boyfriends, American girls pretend they are women, while Japanese women pretend they are girls” Kittredge Cherry

“When [Japanese] women encouraged men to bask in public glory, it reminded me of the way you would indulge a child with a sweet-bean treat” Kittredge Cherry

“In direct confrontation, the [Japanese] women might yield like blades of grass- and spring back just as quickly. One of them compared this flexibility to the Vietcong guerrillas…” Kittredge Cherry

“All this is something for girls to do now that boys are hopeless: they are tied up with expectations (the job), they are zombied out (video games, porn tapes), they can’t talk, they can’t think, they just aren’t much fun. But we girls, we know how to have fun: we giggle, we scream, we have our pictures taken by the hundreds, we shop- here we come” Donald Ritchie gets inside the heads of the Shibuya panda-girl gyaru (rather him than me!)

“I have seen a 12-year-old boy come into a room where his grandmother was watching… her favourite soap opera, and switch to the teenage gangster serial… without a word of either apology or explanation. Grandmother accepted the change with all the resignation that 65-years’ experience of Japanese men had put at her command” Ronald P. Dore

“The only woman I have ever met who still had blackened teeth, a curious cosmetic device -or perhaps anti-cosmetic since it was confined to married women- which practically disappeared well before the end of the last century” Ronald P. Dore